


The Long Winter

by blithers



Category: Innkeeper Chronicles - Ilona Andrews
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, Recovery, Scent Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 22:56:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17031522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: Sean shifts into his wolf form the evening after Dina receives the news that the Gertrude Hunt has been granted a temporary stay in the Assembly’s investigation into the corrupted innkeeper on Baha-char, and that they’re to take no guests until further notice.  Dina traces her fingers along the kitchen walls, apologizing to the inn silently.  Sean goes for a run as a wolf and stays that way.





	The Long Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hiddencait](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hiddencait/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, hiddencait! I hope you're having a good one.
> 
> Thank you to my beta reader, katayla!
> 
> This story takes place post- _One Fell Sweep_ , with a reference to spoilers for _Sweep of the Blade_.

Sean shifts into his wolf form the evening after Dina receives the news that the Gertrude Hunt has been granted a temporary stay in the Assembly’s investigation into the corrupted innkeeper on Baha-char, and that they’re to take no guests until further notice. Dina traces her fingers along the kitchen walls, apologizing to the inn silently. Sean goes for a run as a wolf and stays that way. He curls up at the foot of her bed that evening, tucking his nose underneath his paws, and sleeps, long and dreamless, into the late morning.

He patrols the edges of his territory, through the winding, Arthurian streets of the Avalon subdivision, peeing on stunted Texan trees in the winter cold. He sniffs along the inn’s boundaries, trying to sense Gertrude Hunt’s roots, pulsing with their strange, tangled magic underneath the dirt. He can feel the inn’s aura faintly now, a new thing within the last week, like a hand ghosting up the back of his neck. He considers the entirety of the subdivision his territory, but the reach of the inn marks the limit of what he now considers his home: a deeper concept, a place that he considers _his_ in the core of his being.

He’s still thinking about this new, tenuous connection to the inn as Dina idly scratches behind his ears after dinner, sitting in the downstairs living room, cradling a mug of cocoa with Sean panting at her side in front of the too-hot fireplace. Dina is still recovering from her coma, conserving her energy during the days, and looks tired and contemplative, staring into the flames.

It takes him a moment to realize that, at some point, she’d stopped petting him. He lifts his snout up to her, cocking his head a bit to the side.

“Sean,” she asks, “are you okay?”

Sean whines an answer, trying for reassurance, and Dina hesitates, then nods. She continues stroking absently behind his ears, gazing off into the fire and resting.

-

January clings to the world, painting the earth in wintery grey and dull browns, and bringing alternating days of dull, overcast skies and the clear, blue days of windy Texas cold. Dusk falls early. They eat dinner after dark falls and hibernate in the long, confined evenings.

He falls through the days as a wolf without thought, and the relief of not having to talk - of not having to chat pleasantly about inanities with the neighbors, of not having to pretend contentment, of not having to wear the itchy manners of human civilization like a sweater shrunk too-small in the wash - is immense, like shedding a burden he hadn’t even known he was carrying.

He’s different in his wolf form, he knows this. He can still think and reason, he’s still _himself_ , but the deep parts of him that are wolf - the instincts he now knows were bioengineered into his kind, the overwhelming need to claim and protect - are stronger when he’s like this. He serves as Dina’s shadow, a self-appointed bodyguard, trading off with Beast. He shows his teeth to Caldenia when she makes a joke about poisoning everybody at the inn, even though he knows he shouldn’t, even though the human part of him knows she is not serious. Caldenia snaps back at him, her teeth sharpened to points.

He thinks, sometimes, of the prophecy Dina was given on at the Sanctuary of Eno, that everything alive inside of her will die, and a vast, useless anger rises up within him, sharp and suffocating. He would fight overwhelming odds to keep her; he would trade his own life for hers, a soldier’s morality burned deep into his genetics. It seems unnecessarily cruel of the universe to take that option away from him. He doesn’t know when the Holy Seramina’s prophecy will come to pass, or if it already has, with the coma Dina suffered; he’s not even sure he even believes in the ability of any creature in this universe to see the future, but the possibility of it burns inside of him, and the wolf inside of him howls and rages.

Dina purchases an HBO subscription for the inn, and they start to watch Game of Thrones together with Caldenia in the evenings. Dina sits on the couch and knits a baby blanket for Officer Marais, who’d just told them that he and his wife were expecting their third child, while Caldenia dissects the politics of the show for them over the course of each episode. It’s a master class in political manipulation; Sean tries to consider the subject academically, and not think about the millions of sentient beings who suffered under Caldenia’s rule.

During the days, Dina researches the words _Sebastian North_ as Sean lies at her feet, increasingly frustrated with her inability to make anything of the cryptic phrase. Olasard’s collar has provided no further leads, if the initials S.N. even have anything to do with Dina’s parents in the first place, and every database or resource text that Dina can think to check contains nothing of value.

“Sebastian?” Dina tries, and Olasard arches his back and twines between her legs, flicking his tail. “Sebastian North?”

The Ripper of Souls looks up at her solemnly, unblinking cat eyes with stars and nebulas and galaxies swirling in their depth.

Dina sighs. “I don’t know, Sean. I just don’t know.”

Sean licks her hand, and tries to look as supportive and encouraging as a giant shaggy black wolf-dog possibly can. He even wags his tail once.

-

“I’ve never cooked for a wolf before,” Orro says, and wacks at the joint of a cow leg with a cleaver. “It’s invigorating.”

Orro serves him meat at their meals, generous cuts with the bones still in, prepared raw or barely seared, with minimal augmentation of herbs and spices to enhance the taste. Mounds of blueberries and ash berries and cowberries are presented on his plate like jewels. After the second day Caldenia asks to be served whatever Sean is eating - she gnaws at the bones daintily, wiping her mouth clean with a napkin afterward, the berries smearing her mouth like blood. 

“I’m sure Sean is doing this just to provide you with the challenge,” Dina says dryly, and continues to butter the piece of toast she’s making.

Orro grunts, and and manages to finally detach the knee joint of the leg he’s butchering. Beast watches the procedure with rapt attention from his position at Orro’s feet, eyes fastened on the bones like laser beams.

“Speaking of which, how long has it been?” Caldenia asks.

“Almost two weeks.”

Caldenia nods, with uncharacteristic understatement. Sean slaps his tail twice on the floor, to remind them that he is part of this conversation, and Dina reaches an absent hand down to ruffle the fur at the scruff of his neck.

-

An ice storm sweeps through the county a couple days later, caking the electrical lines in heavy, beautiful icicles and causing a blackout that takes out the entire town of Red Deer. The inn generates its own electricity, but Dina asks the inn to turn off all the lights to match the preternaturally dark subdivision and brings into existence a rooftop patio off the back eave of the house. She pulls up the heavy wooden dining table from storage, along with beeswax candles and warm woolen blankets. Space heaters sprout from the floor around the table like mushrooms. Orro makes a dish from the Quillonian homeworld, a thick, hearty stew, redolent with herbs and encased in freshly baked bread, which spills out, steaming, as you eat it. Sean picks it apart delicately, nosing at the bread with his snout.

The air is crisp and cold, and the lack of ambient light from the neighborhood means that the stars are brilliant and sharp above them, the silver band of the Milky Way visible across the true black of the night sky. There is a new moon tonight, a slim blood-red arch on the horizon. Ice cracks on the branches of the apple trees in the orchard, echoing in the night. Sean wonders which of the points of light above them is Nexus. He wonders which is the light of the sun of the shattered world of Auul, destroyed and gone and an open wound on his parent’s souls.

“My family is somewhere up there,” Dina says, staring up at the night sky, a wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

“See that group of stars right there?” Caldenia points to a brilliant little cluster, so close together they look like a nebula from this distance. “I used to rule those stars,” she says, a bit wistfully.

Orro doesn’t say anything, but he looks down and clutches the bread of his homeworld tighter in his clawed hand.

Sean sits back on his haunches and howls, soft and mournful, at the moon. As the howl dies he looks over at Dina; she is watching him, her eyes serious and solemn and impossibly blue in the flickering candlelight.

The four of them sit together under a black sky strewn with the light of distant worlds, lost in their own thoughts, as ice cracks eerily around them.

Everybody is somber as they come downstairs. Orro and Caldenia disappear to their respective rooms, and Sean trots after Dina as they closes down the inn for the evening and heads to their bedroom. She’d changed her room recently, shifting it to match his own relatively spartan, ex-military tastes as well as her own.

Dina is quiet as she changes into one of the oversize t-shirts she likes to sleep in, her back to him as she undresses. She undoes the hooks of her bra, pulling her blonde hair out of its low ponytail, and the curves of her body glow dimly in the soft light of the bedroom. The muscles of her naked back flex as she pulls the shirt on. Rivulets of ice cake the window in the bedroom like silver.

Beast whines at the foot of the bed, and circles three times before settling down in the dog bed there. Olasard is nowhere to be seen - he’s taken to sleeping in the kitchen next to the stove, purring and warm as Orro sneaks him table scraps. Sean jumps up onto the quilted comforter of the bed, puts his chin on his paws, and watches as Dina pads on bare feet over to the bed. Her expression is contemplative, and perhaps a bit sad. Her t-shirt has Hello Kitty printed on the front; it reaches just to mid-thigh. She’d been wearing the same shirt the first time he met her, out in her orchard in the middle of the night.

Dina sits next to him on the bed and and buries her face in the black fur at his neck.

They fall asleep entangled together, and when Sean drifts to consciousness sometime later, the bedroom is dark and silent and perfectly still and he is human again. Dina is wrapped around his body, clinging like an octopus, her breathing deep and even in his ear. Sean lets the moment sit, and closes his eyes again.

He wakes up the next morning to a raging hard-on and Dina’s butt wedged firmly back against him. Her t-shirt is rucked up around her waist, and his hand is draped across her torso, just under her breasts.

Dina stirs next to him, and presses back against his erection.

“Hey,” she murmurs, and reaches back to rake her fingers across his scalp, her body stretching against his own.

“Hey,” he says back, his voice rusty and low from disuse, the first human word he’s spoken in more days than he cares to count.

“Are you back?” she asks, sleepily.

He doesn’t pretend not to know what she means. “I’m back.”

“I missed you,” she murmurs.

“I’m always here.”

“You know what I mean,” she says, and when they fuck he bites the nape of her neck to keep her still.

-

They have sex whenever they can manage in the days after, heady and horny like teenagers, as all the feelings that were dammed up in his wolf form spill out again, messy and wanting.

Sex with Dina is nothing like he remembers from the one night stands and short term girlfriends that had dotted his teens and early twenties. He’d expected his obsession with her would dull somewhat, become familiar and more gently loving after they’d been sleeping together for a while, but the opposite seems to happen: he wants her with an intensity that only becomes sharper the more he has her. He goes down on Dina relentlessly, desperate for her taste in his mouth. The more their scents intertwine, the more he craves it.

Perhaps he should have expected this. The first time he’d had sex with Dina had been a revelation, after all - he’d been planning his specific moves since returning back to Earth, and he’d been fantasizing about her with a single-minded intensity for almost two years - and they’d both been panting for each other even with the dual threats of imminent death and interstellar genocide hanging over their heads. He’d been celibate for so long he’d almost come from the first tentative brush of her hand against his cock, and he’d barely managed to wait out Dina’s orgasm, gritting his teeth, before he was coming himself, long and hard, his mind wiped blank and warmly, comfortably numb, for the first time since Nexus.

The wolf part of him is perhaps a bit bemused by his sexual preoccupation with a woman who isn’t in heat, even if she is his mate. The human part of him wants to go down on Dina for days, and live inside her body. He buys a second large box of condoms at Walgreens in quick enough succession that the store clerk remembers him from buying the first, which is a moment both mortifying and awesome in Sean’s life.

Their pheromones braid together the more they sleep together, scent markers merging, and it smells so good, so _right_ that it makes Sean go a little crazy whenever he scents it on Dina’s skin. It occurs to him that this might be what marriage smells like to werewolves, this joining of two people in the most fundamental way possible. He wonders if this is what his parents smell like to each other. He almost asks his mom, but chickens out at the last moment. It’s such a personal thing to know about his own parents, if the way he craves Dina’s taste in the back of his throat is something he inherited or some strange, personal cocktail, unique to the two of them.

-

He makes a run to Walmart and Home Depot after the ice melts off the roads, knocking off a large chunk of the inn’s to-do list now that he’s back in his human form. Dina has elaborate plans to expand the small pond at the back of the inn during the upcoming summer, and raw materials for gardening work are discounted in the off-season so it makes sense to stock up now. Gertrude Hunt eats the paving stones and bags of gravel as fast he can unload them from the bed of his pickup, swallowing the supplies whole. He can feel the inn’s gratitude when he’s done, skimming pleasantly just underneath his skin.

He’s started to practice directing the inn with Dina’s help, learning to rearrange their shared bathroom so the height of the vanity better suits his size and shuffling items around in the practice room she created for him. Gertrude Hunt listens to him patiently, but the magic of the inn feels strange to him, like flexing the muscles of a third arm sprouting from his chest he never even knew he had. He has nothing of Dina’s innate feel for the peculiar magic of the Innkeepers, the way she breathes and moves with the inn, without thought or particular effort.

“Your inn is part of you, when you’re an Innkeeper.” She runs her fingers along the scar that bisects his face, slicing one of his eyebrows in half. “The inn is your body and you encompass the inn. You’re separate, but in fundamental ways, you also aren’t.”

“How does the inn feel about becoming part werewolf?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Gertrude Hunt that.”

“Well?” He reaches out to touch the wooden wall next to Dina’s bed. “What do you think, girl?”

The walls around them ripple lazily, like a bird ruffling its feathers.

“The inn likes you,” Dina says, smiling a little.

“The feeling is mutual.”

Dina reaches out a hand and a glass of ice water floats toward it, carried along by a tentacle that grows out from the floor, like a creepy, silent waiter. His life is increasingly surreal, which is saying something for a native-born werewolf who fought a never-ending war on an alien planet where time expanded and shrank like ocean waves.

“So how does the Innkeeper thing work, officially? Is there a test I have to take, or some sort of trial?”

“There’s no test.” Dina’s fingers run down the tendon of his neck to trace a curve of his armor, curved like tribal tattoos across his chest, peeking out from beneath his t-shirt. Lust creeps up his spine. “Gertrude Hunt will tell you when it’s time. That’s all there is to it.”

Well, that sounded nothing if not ominous.

“I can’t tell you any more than that. But it’s… ceremonial, more than anything else.”

Dina goes back to following the slice of the scar across his face again with her fingers, tracing it with interest. She’s never asked him exactly how he came by that scar, although she might know from when the inn had bonded them during the peace summit, when he had seen into her thoughts and she had seen the memories of Turan Adin.

He pulls her hand away from his face, and intertwines her fingers with his own.

“And after that,” she says, “we’ll inform the Assembly that you’re an Innkeeper now as well. They’ll update Gertrude Hunt’s listing.”

“Of course they will.”

“And that’s all we have to do.”

“Nothing to it,” Sean says, and leans forward to kiss her.

-

“Why were you a wolf for so long?” she asks, later that night, the two of them lying naked together in the darkness.

He pushes her hair back from her face, and pulls the blanket further up around her bare shoulders as he considers her question. He’d fantasized about this when he was on Nexus; he’d fixated on Dina with an intensity he never wants to have to fully explain to her. He wakes up some nights sure that he is still on Nexus, that he’s about to wake up from this pleasant daydream of a life and don the hooded cloak and kill sentient beings again, numb and disconnected from the horror of it. He holds Dina after she falls asleep, wide awake, and irrational fears eat at his chest, fed by the slippery feeling of surreality that nighttime brings. He is terrified that if he closes his eyes he will open them again on Nexus, and that nothing will have truly changed.

He thinks of the prophecy of the Holy Seramina, and something cold shivers inside of him.

“It was easier,” he says, finally. “For a little while, it was easier.”

Her voice is quiet. “I really did miss you. I know you were here the whole time, but it didn’t feel the same.”

He rolls over on top of her, tucking her body underneath his, enveloping her. Dina wraps her arms around him, hugging him close in the night, and he buries his face in her neck.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Dina tightens her arms around his torso, and doesn’t say anything else.

-

He goes for a run the next morning, the sun gleaming dimly through a fog that wraps over the earth and sinks into Sean’s bones as he moves. He sprints to outpace the bite of the cold, the windows of the subdivision houses and cars caked in frost as he passes. He takes care to run no faster than a normal human would, but a violent restlessness stalks him, so he leaves the sidewalks for a flat gravel trail just past the subdivision, a reclaimed railway track that runs for miles out through empty Texas prairie.

When he’s sure there’s nobody else around, he opens up. The speed feels so good his armor swims to the surface of his body in sheer pleasure, swirling in dark, restless lines underneath his long-sleeve workout shirt. He runs full-speed for a couple miles, then slows to a sustainable lope. The sun is higher in the sky now, starting to burn off some the haze of the morning. The air is so crisp he feels like he could take a bite out of it.

He comes to a low meadow bordered by some scraggly trees, brown with dead grass and rimmed in frost, and a mature deer, burdened with heavy antlers, lifts its head near the treeline. 

Sean skids to a stop and freezes. The buck stands majestic, its mouth working and nostrils flaring, but Sean is standing safely downwind, his predator scent masked from the animal. He can count at least a dozen points on the deer’s wide antlers.

There had been no wildlife on Nexus, nothing that survived the desolation and death that ravaged the planet daily, soaking the dirt in blood and all the unpleasant, viscous fluids that can spill from alien bodies. Sean looks at the deer, standing wild and free before him in the fog of the morning, crowned with antlers huge and unruly and ancient, like something out of one of the fairy tales or legends his mom used to read to him when he was a kid.

Something heavy and uncomfortable and angry inside of him turns over. He swallows and tastes salt and bitterness, thick and hot at the back of his throat.

He takes a step backward, and another one, and turns and runs away. When his armor reforms over his entire body, he shifts into his wetwork form and just runs harder.

-

January fades into February, and there’s still no word from the Assembly. 

They’ve been forbidden from taking guests for close to a month now. The ban is wearing on Gertrude Hunt, and on Dina by extension, but when Sean asks if there is anything they can do to hurry the Assembly’s decision, Dina merely shakes her head.

The weather warms up after the dreary January, and the wind smells fresh and unseasonably good for a couple of days. Sean can sense the eagerness of the earth underneath the dead brown grass, as if the seeds laying dormant through the winter under the soil wonder if this is really spring already. Dina runs drills with Gertrude Hunt in the morning, working through security procedures until a steady rain starts to fall and she’s forced to take refuge inside again with a cup of tea and a plate of shortbread cookies that Orro had made earlier in the day.

Dina blows across the surface of her tea, then takes a careful sip. “You know, there’s supposed to be a storm tonight. Thunder and lightning and everything.”

Orro kneads bread on the butcher block countertop. Flour dusts the spikes of his quills, like a sprinkling of snow all over his entire body. The entire kitchen smells good, heavy with the familiar scent of yeast and a pungent mix of spices that Sean can’t completely identify, the warmth from the oven keeping everything inside cozy, tucked away against the growing drizzle outside.

“Really?” Sean asks. Storms are unusual in the Texas winter; the relative cold seems to keep the massive thunderstorms that build over the prairie during the summer months from developing.

“Well, that’s what the news says, at least. Must be all the warm weather we’ve had recently.”

“Darlings, I’m off to the greenhouse,” Caldenia says, sailing through the kitchen on her way to the back door in a raincoat, a pair of rubber-finger gardening gloves in one hand and her stylish hair covered by a clear plastic rain bonnet. “I’m going to check on my seedlings. Is there fertilizer somewhere I could use, Dina?”

Dina’s eyes go a bit unfocused, and Sean knows she’s pulling a bag of plant fertilizer up from Gertrude Hunt’s storage as they speak, rearranging the known universe on the vagaries and whims of her guests. “Of course,” Dina says easily. “There’s some fertilizer next to the terracotta pots, near the back. You can’t miss it.”

“Lovely,” Caldenia says. “You always think of everything, Dina.”

Dina takes another sip of her tea, looking pleased.

Dina spends the afternoon curled with the latest book in the series that she and Caldenia have been devouring from the library - a Victorian mystery series, fussily lovely dresses paired with viciously bloody murders - as the day outside grows more threatening and the temperature falls. Orro serves up a simple dinner of a thick, hearty three bean chili with jalapeno cornbread, and tells them all a rare story over supper from his own childhood about learning to bake bread as the first hint of thunder rumbles outside.

The evening turns into a surreal winter thunderstorm, the temperature just warm enough to not change the sleeting rain into snow, with lightning that illuminates the clouds like the flashes of a photographer’s light bulb. Dina opens up a large domed skylight over the bed in her room for the occasion, and they lay on top of her bed, fully clothed and holding hands, watching cold rain bead on the window above them. Ice builds up at the edges of the glass. Lightning jumps from cloud to cloud above them, and the thunder is a low, deep roll in the distance.

The beauty over their head is wild and terrible, and Sean feels, for a strange, surreal moment, that this storm can’t possibly exist on Earth. “It’s so beautiful, it doesn’t seem real,” he says.

“I know what you mean,” Dina says. “It is a bit otherworldly, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“It reminds me of this world that I visited with Klaus, the eighth moon of Persei. It was a moon large enough that it had its own thin atmosphere - molecular hydrogen and helium, some hydrogen sulfide and water - a bit like Jupiter, actually. It was basically uninhabitable, but mining operations meant that there was a small spaceport that we were passing through. The storms there were... stunning. Violent and alien and stunning.”

“You know, I never really ended up seeing much of the rest of the galaxy,” Sean says. "Wilmos sent me to Nexus, but it wasn’t like there was vacation time associated with the position.”

Dina is silent for a while.

“Do you ever still feel like you want to see more of it?” she asks finally, and Sean can hear the guarded, painstakingly casual way she asks the question. “See more of the universe, I mean?”

Dina hides her loneliness carefully, shielding it like a bruise underneath the cloak of her chosen profession. It makes him wish, sometimes, that he’d cleared enough of the fog from his head to be able to send her the occasional message when he was fighting on Nexus, but that regret is an old one, with little enough he can do about it now.

“I saw enough of this universe for a dozen lifetimes,” he says. “And what I do still want to see, I want to see with you.”

Dina’s hand tightens in his own. “The life of an Innkeeper means we won’t get to see many of those places together.”

“The life of an Innkeeper means the universe comes to you.”

“That’s a nice way to think about it.”

“It’s the truth.”

Thunder crashes over their heads, and they look up at an alien sky over a familiar planet.

Sean watches the storm some more, but when he glances over again Dina is the one watching him, her features shadowed. Sean wraps an arm around her waist and reels her in closer.

He buries his nose in her neck. Dina smells like nothing else; it’s so good, he can end up hard just by sitting next to her casually at the inn for a couple minutes, sharing a cup of coffee and covertly inhaling her scent. Up close and personal, it can be almost too much to take.

“You smell so good,” he tries to say, but the words seem wholly inadequate.

“Oh yeah?” She wiggles herself closer to him.

“Yeah,” he says, and leans in to scent her. Lightning flashes above their heads. “You smell like everything I’ve ever wanted in this world.”

“And what does _everything you’ve ever wanted_ smell like?”

“You,” he says. “It smells like you.” He drags his tongue up the side of her neck, tasting her more than anything else, and she shifts restlessly next to him on the bed, arousal spiking in the air. The rain comes down relentlessly on the huge skylight above them, as they lie beneath a raging atmosphere inside a dark glass bubble, safe from the storm.

“Can I eat you out?” he asks against the delicate skin behind her ear, underneath the thunder.

Dina shivers. “If you insist.”

-

“Hey Sean?”

He looks up from the plasma gun he’s dismantling and cleaning on the dining room table. “Yeah?”

“There’s a message from Maud, and it says it’s for both of us.”

Sean pulls a tarp over the weapon he’s cleaning, asks Gertrude Hunt politely to guard the room, and follows Dina down into the operations center of the bed and breakfast. Maud doesn’t contact Dina often, but Dina always passes on the essentials to Sean afterward, filling him in on Maud’s life as well as Arland’s while they’re away. She’s never sent a message for him as well.

The vid is brief: Helen sits in Maud’s lap, bouncing with excitement, as Maud tells them, looking unexpectedly nervous, that she and Arland are engaged to be married, and that she would be greatly honored if both of them would attend the wedding later that year. Maud hesitates at the end, and appears to be about to say something more before cutting the feed. The video ends with a soft click, Helen waving bye-bye, as the screen goes to black. 

Sean leans back. “Well, I guess those crazy kids actually did it.”

“I’m happy for them,” Dina says, but there’s something a bit distant about how she says it.

Even though he’s always sensed that there’d never been that much more than mutual respect and a shallow sort of physical attraction behind Arland’s pursuit of Dina, he still thinks that losing a potential suitor to your own sister would feel strange, even when things work out for (what Sean considers) the absolute best. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine.” She frowns. “I just - I guess I didn’t think things between them would move so quickly, that’s all. This process took Maud two years last time, after all. But Maud deserves all the happiness in the universe, and Arland is an honorable man. I think they’ll be good together.”

Sean nods.

“It doesn’t hurt that Arland’s hot,” Dina continues, and gives him a sly, sideways look. “I mean, he’s really hot. Maud deserves that, too.”

“Absolutely,” Sean agrees neutrally, and Dina smirks. “Will we be able to attend the wedding? Will Gertrude Hunt be okay for that long?”

He smile fades a bit. “We’ll have to figure it out. I hope so.”

“Did you attend your sister’s first wedding? To what’s-his-name?”

“Melizard. And no - Maud’s marriage to Melizard was about leaving her own family behind just as much as joining his family. She wanted to be the best wife she could be, and her wedding was the beginning of that new life.” She sighs, and the screen in front of them disappears back into the wall, swallowed back into Gertrude Hunt. “I sent Maud and Melizard a Kitchenaid mixer as a wedding present.”

Sean barks a laugh.

Dina smiles. “I’m pretty sure Maud never used it.”

“I can’t even imagine her baking.”

“Yeah, it’s not really her thing.”

“Selfishly,” he adds, a bit cautiously, “I’m glad I’m not going to have to fight Arland for you now.” It’s 99% a joke, but there’s a small enough kernel of truth buried in the statement that he’s not completely sure how Dina will take it.

“Drat,” she says. “I was so looking forward to that.”

“Very funny, Miss Demille.”

“Ooh, feisty. Are you so sure you would have won?”

“For you? Absolutely.”

-

Sean picks up a cheap fishing rod and some tackle from Cabela’s, and Dina opens up a portal to a vast alien ocean. She tries to explain the mechanics of the procedure to him as she does, but as the entire explanation seems to boil down to “ignore the laws of physics and proceed accordingly from there,” she ends up simply promising that interdimensional gateways will make sense to Sean sooner than he expects. She helps him pull up a couple battered deck chairs from storage and a five gallon bucket for whatever he happens to catch.

His parents had loved to fish, sitting by streams and ponds back in Tennessee, quietly staring at the water and rarely catching anything. He’d thought it was the dullest hobby he could imagine for a long, long time. He thinks differently about that, now.

Orro sits with him, a giant, quivering hedgehog wedged into a battered lawn chair, and inspects everything that Sean reels into Gertrude Hunt’s living room, categorizing each fish caught as edible or something to release. Sean pulls in a rainbow of fish, in a range of colors that don’t exist naturally on Earth. He reels in a mostly clear alien jellyfish that shimmers in the sunlight like the opalescent sheen on a bubble, and a large, snapping eel-type of creature with bifurcated heads that tries to wind around his arm and squeeze it like a boa constrictor. Orro tells him to keep the jellyfish and to toss the eel back.

That night, Orro serves them a spectacular spread of sushi for dinner, painstakingly arranged on hand-shaped balls of vinegared rice and seaweed, the deep, varied colors of the raw alien fish beautifully presented alongside flowers of wasabi and petaled fresh ginger. There is hot green tea in delicate ceramic cups, and warm hand towels before the meal for them to clean their fingers with.

“Orro,” Caldenia says, “you’ve outdone yourself. This is simply magnificent.”

Orro shivers, and all his spikes stand up on end.

“Hey, I caught the fish,” Sean protests. “Give a guy some credit.”

Caldenia inclines her head. “You’re very good at killing things, werewolf. My congratulations.”

Orro serves up shots after dinner as a digestif, from a batch of moonshine he’d been making out in the stables from sweet Tennessee corn and the Quillonion equivalent of malted barley. Caldenia and Orro join them for a single shot, and then Dina and Sean take the rest of it into the living room and finish the unlabeled bottle off together comfortably. Beast perches on Dina’s lap as she rubs behind the dog’s ears, and the fireplace crackles in front of them as they trade stories.

“And so my parents chucked the guy in a guest room, removed the windows and doors, and called the kid’s parents,” Dina says, and begins to laugh.

Her cheeks are flushed bright red, her pale skin showing the effect of the alcohol. Sean’s werewolf metabolism means it takes a lot to get him drunk - he’s only been legitimately drunk a couple times in his life, and those few times had been the result of immense quantities of alcohol and real determination - but Orro’s moonshine is strong and doing the trick nicely. He’s riding a good tipsy wave at this point, not quite drunk, exactly, but pleasantly buzzed.

Dina, he’s pretty sure, is straight-up drunk.

“Did you ever find out the guy’s real name?”

“I don’t remember anymore. But his real name wasn’t Dracula, that’s for sure. Melizard was furious when he found out another vampire had been pursuing Maud - that was right when Maud was giving Melizard the run around pretty hard, so he was feeling pretty frustrated, I guess.”

“Blue balls,” Sean says, and nods wisely. 

“Something like that.” Dina laughs again, and Sean thinks, with a twist in his chest, he could happily watch her laugh for the rest of his life. He feels unaccountably fond of everything in this moment: his life, this woman, even the annoying yappy killer-dog she’s holding. “Teenage boys acting like teenage boys, more than anything else.” She takes another sip of her drink. “What were you like that that age?”

“I was an asshole. I thought I was hot shit, and I thought the world owed me something, but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I was owed, and that uncertainty just made me sort of… angry.” He shrugs. “You know most of this. There’s a reason I skipped out on college.”

“I’m glad you became the person you became,” Dina blurts out, then wrinkles her nose up. “That sounds weird. I mean, even if you were a jerk kid back then, that teenager werewolf still grew up to be the Sean Evans that I know, and I wouldn’t change who you are now for anything.”

“I…” He doesn’t quite know what to say to that. “Thanks.”

Dina smiles, then frowns, and swallows hard, convulsively.

“Are you okay?” Dina’s face is alternating red with an alarming wash of pale, unhealthy white.

”Oh my god.” She makes a face, and works her mouth open and closed twice, like a fish. “Sean. Sean. I think I’m drunk, Sean.” Dina passes a hand over her face, then leans over and throws up rather spectacularly on the floor at her feet.

“Oops,” she says, frowning at the floor with a childish sort of dismay. “I threw up Orro’s moonshine. We can never tell him that this happened.”

“Your secret is safe with me. C’mon, let’s get you to bed,” he says, rubbing the back of Dina’s neck. He asks Gertrude Hunt to deal with the vomit, and it vanishes neatly into the wood flooring without a trace. Housekeeping in a sentient inn really is something else.

He helps Dina up the stairs and pulls up a glass of water and some aspirin on the nightstand next to their bed, supervises her drinking the entire glass, and puts her to bed. Olasard curls up on the comforter next to her, and Beast settles in at her feet as Dina falls asleep, snoring faintly.

-

Sean gets reservations at the local steak place, taking his best girl out for the night, and buys a new dress shirt for the occasion. He thinks the entire trip to the mall for the shirt might be worth it for the blatant way Dina looks him over after he changes, her eyes sliding up his torso and down to his wrists where he is tugging at the sleeves to fix his cuffs.

“Take a picture, baby, it’ll last longer,” he says, and tries not to feel _too_ smug about it.

“Whatever, hot stuff,” she says, but she licks her lips as she watches him, eyes dark, and Sean forgets whatever smartass thing he was about to say next.

They walk out to his pickup. Dina is pressed up against his side in a coat over a sky blue dress with a square neckline. He’s achingly aware of the size of her waist in the vintage dress she’s wearing, and the way he could span the curves of her body with his hands alone. He’s hard before he starts up the truck, and resigned to a dinner of excellent food and immense sexual frustration. He re-adjusts his erection in his pants and tries valiantly to think about anything else.

Their steaks are delicious, the side salads crisp and delightful, and Sean has never wanted a meal to be over as much as this one. He holds Dina’s hand chastely on the white tablecloth and fantasizes about all the things he wants to do to her. He imagines her on hands and knees in front of him. He thinks about choking on her body, and he wants it so bad he can taste it.

Dina takes a sip of her wine and raises an eyebrow. “You’re looking at me like I’m Little Red Riding Hood, and you’re the big bad wolf.” She turns over his hand in her own, and rubs a finger across his knuckles. “My, what big hands you have.”

“The better to grab you with.”

“What big teeth you have.”

“The better to eat you with, my dear,” he says, and lets his teeth show.

Dina flushes, her gaze snagging on his mouth, and draws a sharp breath. “Why, Sean Evans, I never.”

Sean leans forward, dropping his voice low. “But, my love, you should.”

They barely make it back to his truck before they’re on each other. Dina smells like sex already, so desperate and good that he can’t think straight. He huffs her neck until she starts to laugh and pushes him off, telling him he’s tickling her, so he kisses her instead, pressing her back against the door of his pickup, trapping her body between his and the cold metal of the truck. He’d parked in the far back corner of the parking lot, hopefully far enough away from prying eyes.

She gropes blindly for the handle, and opens up the door behind her by touch; he lifts up Dina by the waist into the cab of the truck. She scoots back to make room for him. Her sky blue skirt flares out like a bell around her on the bench seat of the pickup truck, like the girl at the beginning of some 1950s monster flick.

They make out for a while, Dina squirming underneath him, trying to grind up against his leg. Her fingers go to the buttons of his pants, fumbling in her haste. Sean runs both his hands up underneath her skirt, shoving the fabric out of the way.

“Fuck,” he says, and thunks his head down on her shoulder. “ _Fuck_. I don’t have a condom.” He’s taken to carrying one in his wallet on the regular again, the first time he’s done that for years, back when the promise of potential sex had glimmered at the dawn of each day, but they’d used the last one a couple days ago and he’d forgotten to grab a new one.

Dina undoes the last button on his pants and arches herself up against him. “That’s okay,” she pants.

“I’ll get you off,” he promises, low, in her ear. “I’ll make you scream, and then I’ll fuck you when we get home.”

Her eyes go dark and unfocused, and her breath hitches. “I’m clean,” she says, finally. “I’m on birth control.” It takes him a couple seconds, dumb with lust and hormones, to understand what she’s suggesting.

“I’m clean too,” he says, starting to breathe harder. He’s never been in a relationship long enough to have this sort of discussion.

There’s a part of him that feels like it would have been more adult of the two of them to have this particular discussion when they’re not also trying frantically to get each other naked, to have a conversation like this dispassionately, over a morning cup of coffee - _darling, I’ve decided that we should start barebacking it; sure, babe, that sounds delightful and the coffee is great, cheers_ \- but Dina’s scent is spiking underneath him and she smells like everything he’s ever wanted, _sex_ and _mate_ and _want_ and _now_ , and he’s rapidly going under.

He thinks that he’s about to be inside of Dina without a condom, skin to skin, pushing his come up inside of her, and his thoughts go white and dizzy and filthy.

Dina doesn’t say anything else, just starts yanking her underwear down from underneath her skirt, trying to find the room to maneuver with both of them squeezed together horizontally in the cab of his truck.

“Come on, come on,” she says, and shoves his pants down to mid-thigh. Sean hooks a thumb in the elastic of his boxer-briefs and pulls them down enough to free his cock, curving up hard against his stomach. Sean’s legs are uncomfortably constricted with the waistband of his pants holding his knees together, and he can’t bring himself to care at all. His cock is dripping wet, spotting Dina’s dress where he’s pressed up against her.

Her arousal clouds the cab of the truck, thick and salty on his tongue, and he wants to go down on her so badly it’s a physical ache, an animal need that he doesn’t know how to satisfy in the cramped space they’re squashed together in.

“Wait.” She pushes against his body. “Sean, wait. This’ll be easier if you sit up.”

It takes them a good minute or so to rearrange themselves so that Dina is sitting on his lap instead, her blue skirt flaring out around them like a blanket. His cock is trapped against his belly, and Dina is rocking against him as they make out, and it feels like high school again for a strange, surreal moment, grinding on some girl in the car, hoping against hope she’ll put a hand down your pants.

He wedges a hand back down between them, finding her clit, and the rhythm of her hips stutters. Sean grabs his cock, stroking himself in the wet accumulating between her legs, then goes back to circling Dina’s clit the way he knows drives her crazy.

Dina bats his hand out of the way impatiently, and grabs his cock to work herself onto him, biting her lip.

The sensation is _unreal_. It’s like nothing he could have imagined: the feel of her, hot and tight around his cock, naked skin on naked skin, the sharp, animal smell of the two of them together. It’s so intense he almost comes, right there.

“Oh my god,” she moans. “You feel - “

She thrusts her hips forward in a tiny, aborted motion, and they both whimper.

“Stop,” he pants. “Stop, stop, don’t move.” He knocks his forehead against her shoulder. “I’m going to come if you move.”

He feels a sensation shiver through Dina’s body, like she’d almost tipped over into her own orgasm at his words. The feeling is so intense he screws his eyes shut, breathing hard.

He is falling apart, pieces of him shattering and restructuring at the same time, his life with Dina rebuilding him molecule by molecule. He loves Dina with a depth he finds difficult to contemplate: _love_ seems a weak sort of word, barely conveying the complexity of emotion he feels when he thinks about her, when he thinks about what his life has become with her. When he thinks about what he would be without her.

He tilts his head up, finding the delicate skin just underneath her ear.

“I’m going to ask you to marry me,” he whispers. He says the words into her skin, unable to bear looking at her face as he tells her this, helpless against the depth of his feelings for her.

“Oh,” she says very softly, above him.

“You should say yes when I ask you.” He puts his teeth to her throat, and his whole body sings with the rightness of it, buried deep inside her, and a pulse of blind possessiveness shudders through his body. “You should say yes to me.”

Her neck arches, delicate, against his mouth. He feels her swallow.

“Say yes,” he whispers.

“Yes,” she gasps.

He reaches down one more time, working his way underneath Dina’s flared skirt. Her stomach muscles clench. She squirms in his lap as he touches her again.

He nudges his hips forward.

“C’mon, baby,” he says against her mouth, and they both start to move at the same time.

He brings his fingers up to his mouth as they move, hardly even thinking at this point, and the taste of her coating his fingers is so good it’s obscene. Dina’s eyes glaze watching him, and when he touches her again she starts to come.

He stays still while she orgasms, breathing through his nose, trying to think about something - _anything_ \- else. He hopes, intensely and blindly and giddy, that he never has to fuck her again with a condom.

She’s boneless when she comes down, easy and pliant, leaning forward to kiss him sloppily. Sean is so hard inside of her it hurts now, so swollen it feels like his cock is probably hooked somewhere up behind her bellybutton. He snaps his hips up, and starts up a fast, rough rhythm, desperate to finish this.

When he comes it’s with a groan, his vision going white and dark, like a blur of moonlight in a field of night.

Dina starts to laugh afterwards, sounding sort of shocked. “Oh my god, that’s so good,” she says.

“Understatement of the century,” he mutters, and hides his face in her neck.

-

The day dawns clear and warm, a pleasant preview of the coming spring. Sean decides to work on the trail leading from the house to Dina’s small pond, directing Gertrude Hunt to bring up new material as he needs it but laying the paving stones himself, welcoming the physical exertion. He strips down to his t-shirt, sweating. The breeze on the back of his bare neck feels cool and good, a small gift of being alive.

The ground underneath him shifts in warning, and he hears something faintly in the distance, like a chime. He’s looking around, trying to find the source of the noise, when he sees Dina walking toward him from the house.

“It’s time,” she says, without preamble.

He brushes the dirt from his hands against his jeans, straightening up. “And good morning to you, too. Time for what?”

“It’s _time_ ,” Dina repeats. Her eyes are wide and dilated, almost drugged, and glowing a strange, ethereal blue. He can feel the tangled roots of Gertrude Hunt underneath his feet then, pulsing with a similar sort of nervous excitement.

 _Oh_.

“Okay. It’s time,” Sean agrees, and reaches for her hand. “What do I do?”

“Follow me.”

Dina leads him back into the inn, holding his hand. Gertrude Hunt quivers and shifts as they walk through the door, the walls and ceilings and floors of the bed-and-breakfast shivering with anticipation. They walk through the dining room and out into the grand ballroom, ending up at the mosaic of Gertrude Hunt on the floor at the center of the room, tiled in pearlescent shades of blue and azure and gold. There is a stylized representation of Dina’s broom entwined the border of the image, circling the place where he stands.

Dina drops his hand, then presses a kiss against his cheek.

“I love you,” she says, and the floor falls away underneath him.

Gertrude Hunt catches him. The same mesh of pulsing roots that he’s seen cocoon Dina when she’s sick or dying catches him in midair, tendrils twisting around his legs and arms. It should feel claustrophobic, the constraint of the tentacled roots wrapping around him in the darkness, but instead Sean feels calm, almost peaceful. The tendrils feel warm and dry against his skin, like the bark of a living aspen. There’s a sensation of controlled downward motion and after a few long, endless seconds in the void Sean’s feet gently touch ground, toes first.

The tentacles pull back, leaving him standing upright in an underground chamber.

Dirt and roots crowd the walls and ceiling, all glowing a pale, eerie green, and magic flits like fireflies in the darkness, blue sparks that ignite and quickly die in the open air. The effect is otherworldly and beautiful; solemn and eerie. The magic here is so thick that Sean can taste it, a clean wash over his palette, like water from a cold mountain spring. The air smells like ozone, the way the land smells after a rainstorm.

This is the heart of the inn, then: Gertrude Hunt’s living, breathing center. Sean takes a step forward, and the tendrils shift in front of him to make a clear path.

He reaches out to gently brush his hand against one of the glowing roots. The inn murmurs back to him.

The path in front of him leads him to the far wall, where a rich tangle of tendrils and roots knot together and pulse with the same green energy, but more intense at this particular spot. The blue sparks of magic in the air cluster more heavily around the branches, alighting like butterflies. He is looking at the exposed, beating heart of Gertrude Hunt.

Sean kneels, and leans forward to place a hand gently on the roots.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s nice to meet you. Officially, I mean.”

For a long moment, nothing happens, and he wonders if there’s something specific he’s supposed to be doing, some phrase or ritual he does have to complete, despite what Dina had said.

And then - slowly - he feels the world around him begin to shift.

He becomes aware of the structure surrounding him - the floor of packed dirt, and above him the roots that form the ceiling here, and above that the physical structure of the inn itself: the thick lumber and concrete that creates the foundation of the house, the steel beams and hardwood of the subflooring, drywall and paint and wallpaper and tiling. Electrical wiring and copper plumbing and more advanced alien technologies spread through the walls and floors like veins, making up the intricate machinery of a functional modern home. His consciousness cracks open and slithers upward, along the painted gables with spun Victorian columns, along the finicky little gables and the beams that form the arch of the roof, to the asphalt shingles in neat rows, protecting everything beneath it.

And then he gasps, and he’s spiraling _outward_ \- through the land that surrounds the inn, to the stables and the greenhouse and the garage and the warm, living roots of the apple orchard that Dina loves so dearly. He can feel the edges of the boundaries of Gertrude Hunt’s roots, which he’s investigated extensively as a wolf, and how the magic of this place - Dina’s magic, Gertrude Hunt’s magic, and what will soon be his own magic as well - weakens considerably past those borders.

He can feel certain places in the house now that are twisted into odd knots - neat little folds of space and time, to make rooms for the guests fit where they have no business fitting, to create views out of windows where no view should be, to stitch a staircase together with a hallway it would not otherwise touch. Gertrude Hunt’s roots extend into other dimensions and pocket realities - Sean can feel the potential for a portal to the alien ocean where he caught fish, and the back alleyway on Baha-char, a mere twist of the fabric of space away, something to be created with the same ease as snapping his fingers.

Gertrude Hunts snakes through his own body at the same time, in a similar way: tracing the muscles and tendons of his body, learning the pathways of nerves and veins, feeling the blood that moves and the bones that stay, touching the armor that lurks underneath his skin. It’s a strangely pleasant sensation, this sharing of knowledge and space.

He can feel Dina above him, still in the ballroom, and her own magic as it twines around Gertrude Hunt’s, achingly and intimately familiar to him already.

After a while the expansion of his physical world starts to feel somewhat more stable, more normal. He wonders what everybody is doing while he’s been down here, and as soon as the thought forms he can tell that Caldenia is in her room, sitting next to her balcony window, and that Orro is in the pantry, scrounging for supplies. Dina is in the ballroom, sprawled out on her back staring at the star-studded ceiling, waiting for him.

His hand is still on the root of Gertrude Hunt, in front of him. It’s been there this whole time.

He stands up, stiffly. He feels woozy and uneven on his feet. He wonders just how long he’s been down here. The light is the same around him, just the glow from the tendrils of the inn and the thick swarm of blue magic in the air. It’s impossible to tell: it could be the middle of the day, or an entire night could have gone by.

He sneezes, and magic flies up ridiculously about him, like disturbing a field full of fairy dust.

 _I’m an Innkeeper now_ , he thinks wildly. _I’m an actual goddamn Innkeeper._

“Thanks,” he whispers. His voice cracks from disuse. He traces one of the roots hanging from the ceiling above him with a hand. “Thank you.”

The inn pulses a response, acknowledging his words.

After a while, he asks the inn to take him back up to Dina. The same tendrils slither out of the wall and scoop him up, and pull him upward through the ceiling and the foundation and the subflooring of the inn, up into the ballroom. Night has fallen outside. There’s a half-eaten plate of food next to Dina, the remnants of a sandwich in wax paper and a used napkin crumpled up next to it on the plate.

Dina shoots to her feet and throws her arms around him in a hug without a single word. He hugs her back, hard. Their magic entwines together, flowing in and around them and through Gertrude Hunt, threading along his bones and through Dina’s body and out through the beams and foundation and walls of the inn around them, wrapping warmly around them and binding them together, new and familiar all at once.

“Oh my god, Sean. I felt when it worked. It was amazing - I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

“I love you,” he says, and buries his face in her neck. He feels a heat behind his eyes, heavy and insistent. He hides his face against Dina, waiting for the feeling to exist and pass. Above them the lights on the ceiling of the ballroom twinkle like the stars at twilight. “I love you,” he repeats again, when he’s able. He chokes on the words.

“I love you, too,” she says quietly, and runs a hand down his back.

-

When it finally happens, it happens quickly.

The Assembly summons them with only a couple hours of notice, and specifies, unusually, that they are to travel to speak with the council in person. Dina and Sean spend the next two hours readying Gertrude Hunt for their absence and making last-minute runs to Costco and Walmart. Dina opens up the portal a few minutes before the stated time; the dimensional gateway leads into an empty hallway of worn stone, like something out of an old castle. Dina stares at the open portal, looking unusually uncertain.

“You okay?”

“I don’t know.” Dina breathes out once, hard. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, Sean.”

“We’ll be together. Whatever comes next, you know we’ll face it together.”

She swallows. “Right.”

Sean feels Dina check in with Gertrude Hunt one last time, telling the inn their lockdown code. Sean shifts, and wishes for the weight of a weapon against his hip. He feels a bit naked without the weapons he’d wanted to bring along (as Dina had informed him that guns and knives were considered in poor taste when meeting the Assembly), but even without them Sean carries the bone-deep knowledge that, always, he is the weapon, and he will protect Dina no matter what comes at the two of them. He will fight any prophecy, he will withstand any siege, he will win out against overwhelming odds. It’s what he was made and bred to do. This, right here, is what he does.

“It’s time,” she says to him.

He takes her hand and they walk together into the stars.


End file.
